Enterprise hits and misses - Black Friday shakes the omni-channel, IT beats its detractors
- Summary:
- This week's edition: Holiday shopping pushes retailers into digital winners and losers, IT triumphs over its detractors, and open source achieves business relevance. Whiffs include Yahoo misfires, bogus airline studies, and your author puts foot in Twitter mouth.
diginomica hit: Black Friday is coming - but where the heck is the omni-channel? - Digital retail misadventures with Stuart Lauchlan
quotage: "Consumers are avoiding the stores as Black Friday draws closer, but retailers haven’t got the seamless, integrated omni-channel experiences in place yet to compensate. - Stuart
myPOV: With holiday shopping on deck, shoppers are airing out their dissatisfaction with the in-store frenzy. But is the so-called "omni-channel" ready to handle the shift? Who better to analyze that enterprise retail maven Stuart Lauchlan? In digibyte – the omni-channel experience isn’t here to cope with Christmas, he starts with the stats: shoppers' beefs with holiday shopping include: crowds (82%), limited parking (48%) and a lack of knowledge/service from seasonal employees (24%).
But it gets worse: the personalized experience hasn't arrived: In-store shoppers want store associates to know what they have previously purchased in the store or online (31%), but only 10% of consumers expect this actually to happen. And, no surprise: "Nearly half of in-store shoppers (48%) believe that they typically know more about a retailer’s product than the store associate." Forget the omni-channel, doesn't sound to me like a single retail channel is working right. And only 1/3 are downloading mobile apps or seeing a connection between online, mobile, and in-store channels.
So what's a consumer to do? Well, they can join me in the "shop at home in your bunny slippers" contingent - though in my thronging hometown, discounts are still enough to lure them out. Not so much at The GAP - Stuart has that story in Can omni-channel save the day as GAP slips on a banana skin? Home Depot is an exception, bucking the downbeat retail trend despite enduring a security breach. Stuart explains in Home Depot’s DIY fix-up for the retail sector, Big digital investments and property improvements are part of the winning mix.
Stuart reports that Walmart is also upbeat (Walmart’s dreaming of a digital Christmas). The latest numbers look (pretty) good, with promises to integrate the digital experience into stores (no sign of that in my local Walmart last time I had to brave the aisles - unless "digital" means no store employees to be found). But, lest we settle into fiscal holiday cheer, Stuart notes that Digital decline knocks Target off-target. (Gist: Target hasn't sorted its e-commerce woes - not good when fifty percent of holiday shopping is projected to be online).
To paraphrase Stuart, Black Friday is coming, so we'll see. I've got my bunny slippers ready.
diginomica five: my completely subjective "top five" stories on diginomica this week- Replacing IT technical debt with cloud functionality debt - Just when companies got a handle on their on-premises tech spaghetti, Brian Sommer rains on the productivity parade with a warning about falling behind on vendor-delivered cloud functionality.
- Performance management – time to rip it up and start again? - Short answer, in my view - yes! But Janine's got a bit more, with views from Jason Averbook. Interesting tightrope allowing ratings-driven dashboards, but flagging the inherent subjectivity of the ratings itself. Hmm....
- German academics tackle cervical cancer in Africa with SAP HANA - Jessica's got one of the better use cases you'll see. Still early stages, but this could solve a real problem with early diagnosis and, therefore, prevention.
- AI and the need for a rational ethical debate - Having a rational, ethical debate about anything is pretty much wishful thinking, but Cath has issued a well considered piece on AI, balancing regulatory, job, and cultural issues. Actually, I wish I had written this piece instead of ranting about email marketing abuses (though that was pretty fun).
- Riffing on Panorama’s 10 ERP predictions for 2016 - Nothing is more wonderful than the slew of #ensw predictions posts that
fartmake their way into the public domain around this time. Den bravely fumigates the first of these and finds some things to agree on, and also some bones of contention.
Vendor analysis, diginomica style - OK, let's strap it up: Phil hit on some breaking news this week in: How Dynamics AX delivers cloud ERP on Microsoft Azure, (gist: Phil is bullish). Den's show reviews continue with a pair of New Relic missives, Lew Cirne, CEO New Relic on sleepless nights, culture, customers and technology, and the intriguinglyg titled Mimosas for breakfast, Obamacare as the entree, Woz as dessert – Future Stack 15 delivers.
Phil did a stellar job of picking up on the unanswered questions from SuccessConnect Vegas in his SuccessConnect Europe updates, SuccessFactors gears up to prove HANA multi-tenancy at scale and his nifty (and popular) use case, Lessons learned from Telefonica’s SuccessFactors rollout.
Speaking of popular, readers liked Stuart's Salesforce eyes $8 billion run rate as strategic business advisor to the CEO (me: now THAT would be a nifty positioning trick if Salesforce can pull it off). Den whips out the enterprise geetar again for Riffing on Salesforce’s ‘age of the customer’ meme. Stuart's got the latest Workday earning news in Workday slides on Q4 outlook as big name customers add up, and Jess has the Rimini update in Unbowed Rimini Street maps out new directions – but continues on a familiar route.
Jon's grab bag - Derek crafted several thought-provokers: Nationwide warns that digital brings “operational complexity” (a frank look at the financial services industry in flux), If we aren’t willing to re-think local gov, maybe local-GDS isn’t the answer (a rethink/update of a previous stance), and New government report highlights shocking gender pay gap in UK (a sobering read, but give me this frank commentary over feel-good platitudes).
Wrapping my picks is Den's Reflections on a packed conference season – getting mobile, sort of. Road miles have a way of bringing issues to bear. Me: agree that the smaller shows tend to be the better/more creative ones, and customer views are - praise the event gods - finally getting more airtime. Yes, event mobile apps are improving but still leave a lot to be desired. Moving from event calendar to Twitter noise gamification is at best a small step to what's possible.
Best of the rest
The Software Defined Megacorporation - Why IT matters - by Tom Foremskiquotage: "There's a new business reality that few companies know about. If you want to be a player in global markets you will need a top-notch IT department. It won't be the same as the current one but whatever you do, don't buy the hype that you can just use off-the-shelf technologies and that the cloud makes IT departments obsolete." Tom Foremski
myPOV: My jonerpnnewsfeed readers liked this spirited polemical from Tom Foremski, who is excited about corporate IT for the first time since he was a young scribe. And why not? After coming off years of "outsourced IT," and IT-as-cost-center, it's refreshing to see tech-can-change-our-business catching on.
It's hard to believe it's been ten years since Nicholas Carr set of a firestorm with his HBR piece, "Does IT Matter?" Carr asked, if every company adopts the same IT, where is the advantage? He wasn't quite right then, but Foremski points out this essay wouldn't fly today. There's too much you can do right if you apply IT in creative ways, and too much that can go wrong if you don't.
As Foremski points out, cloud versus on-premises data center isn't the core of this issue - though we can debate what an all-cloud landscape can do. His bigger point: "The rise of the global digital corporation will require extraordinary levels of IT agility. Even the slightest IT edge will offer tremendous benefits at scale. Where else will that edge come from? It won't be from off-the-shelf solutions." The potent question is: how do organizations get there from here? That question should be an editorial priority in 2016.
Other standouts
- Event redux: Jutras on Intacct; Henschen on IBM - Two worth event reports, one from Cindy Jutras, who parses Intacct's themes/market predictions, as per its recent user conference (Predictions: Intacct Advantage 2015). Sidenote: I like this ambition of flipping the financial users' time from 20 percent planning and 80 percent tasks to the reverse, but that's a seriously high bar. Meantime, Doug Henschen is back from IBM's annual analyst forum, and breaks down IBM's big plays, including the Watson monetization push.
- Yes, it's possible to write a good post on leadership - I know your eyes glaze over when you see a post on leadership; I nod off also. But it's possible to do a good one - if you're specific, honest, or have actually done what you tell others to do. Proof? Sure. Newsfeed readers liked The Keys to Scaling Yourself as a Technology Leader (practical stuff on delegation, building structures not egos, and acknowledging the reality of infighting). Steve Denning's Seven Leadership Keys from Mission Impossible looks to the problem of measuring yourself against incredibly high bars. (I especially like 'adopt unconventional means."). Then there is The Battle for the Digital Corner Office, which advises, amongst other tips, to invent a new P&L and become a digital anthropologist.
- Open source wins the business relevance debate - In Evolving attitudes towards open source, RedMonk's Stephen O'Grady makes as authoritative a case for the business credibility of open source as you are likely to see. Pull quote: "Open source is being viewed, increasingly, as neither an existential threat nor an ideological movement but rather an approach whose benefits frequently outweigh its costs." Natch.
Honorable mention
What purpose does sales forecasting serve any way? - Well, it makes us feel better as we sail into iceberg-filled waters, for one thing...
11 Ways to Manage a Remote Team - I like "cultivate time zone awareness." In other words, call people whenever you want, if they wake up - great.
How Docker Turbocharged Uber’s Deployments - Always interesting to see how (relatively) new companies construct their technology stacks.
After Paris, Encryption Will Be a Key Issue in the 2016 Race - Forget about the elections, encryption is going to be one of the key IT debates, period. The sensationalism is likely to pummel the common sense, however.
Whiffs
Yahoo is locking people out of their email if they use ad blockers - Though the headline is vintage Mashable linkbait (Yahoo is just testing this pea-brained idea on a small number of users to pass the time as they circle the bowl), it does show you how desperate these ad-based models can become.
Can you believe these are the same people that brought us Hadoop? (though from what I know the brilliant Hadoopers have long since bailed on Yahoo). While we're on this whiff, which is via eagle-eyed hits/misses reader Frank Scavo - I'm not going to withhold from ya, this one kind of fell apart for me on Twitter - read the tweetstream and have a few laughs at my expense...
Josh Bernoff of Without Bullshit laid into this one, Happy passengers matter, even if an airline study couldn’t prove it. He deconstructs an absurd report which concluded customer happiness is irrelevant to airline profitability.
Bernoff is (mostly) right - but monopolies flaunt customer experience with impunity. That's the deciding factor - not bad research. Airlines can get away with their insufferable crud because our choice of carriers is pretty limited. But I better stop; I'm starting to get nostalgic for United Airlines Boarding Group 72. Oh, and one more whiff courtesy Scavo's bonehead alerts - if you're filming a family vacation, make sure you are a GoPro, not a GoAmateur (watch the vid for a real whiffer in action). See you next time...
Which #ensw pieces of merit did I miss? Let us know in the comments.
Most Enterprise hits and misses articles are selected from my curated @jonerpnewsfeed. 'myPOV' is borrowed with reluctant permission from the ubiquitous Ray Wang.
Image credits: Cheerful Chubby Man © RA Studio, Happy Children © Anna Omelchenko, Waiter Suggesting Bottle © Minerva Studiom, Overworked Businessman © Bloomua. Loser and Winner © ispstock - all from Fotolia.com
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